Chauncey Jerome House (1832)

The house of Chauncey Jerome, on South Street in Bristol, has seen many changes over the years. Chauncey Jerome was a clockmaker and entrepreneur who became the most successful of the many clock manufacturers in the Bristol area. His house in Bristol was built in 1832. He later he hired architect Joel T. Case to construct a tower and make other alterations to the building (the semicircular window in the front gable, for instance, was changed to a tripartite Palladian window). The house was later owned by Edward Dunbar. Threatened with demolition around 2000, the house was saved to become the Bristol Elks Lodge. The house has lost its tower, as well as other decorative features, and an unattractive modern addition has been constructed on the front. The Images of America series book entitled Bristol Historic Homes has an image on the cover of the house in its former glory.

Whitneyville Congregational Church (1834)

The Whitneyville Congregational Church was built in 1834 in the manufacturing village of Whitneyville, in Hamden. The congregation began as the East Plains Congregational Church in 1795. It’s original meetinghouse on Dixwell Avenue was replaced by a new church, built after much debate, in a new location, next to the Cheshire Turnpike (now Whitney Avenue), on land donated by the widow of Eli Whitney. The Greek Revival structure was inspired by the designs of architect Ithiel Town. The church was enlarged by Rufus G. Russell, a former assistant of Henry Austin, with a pulpit recess in 1867. The dome atop the steeple was added by the end of the nineteenth century.

Elisha Leavenworth House (1845)

Waterbury industrialist Elisha Leavenworth built a Greek Revival house facing the Green in 1845. He moved in with his new wife, Cynthia Fuller Leavenworth, who died in 1854 with her infant child. According to The Town and City of Waterbury, Vol. II (1896):

[Leavenworth] entered into partnership with his father in the drug business, under the firm name of F. Leavenworth & Son. In 1850 he took Nathan Dikeman, Jr., of Northampton, as a partner, and the firm became Leavenworth & Dikeman, and so remained until its dissolution in 1890. […] Soon after the partnership with Mr. Dikeman was formed Mr. Leavenworth ceased to take an active part in the business, and devoted himself to his other interests. On his father’s death, in 1840, he succeeded him as postmaster, and held the office until 1849. He held the same position again, from 1853 to 1861. He represented the town in the legislatures of 1863, 1864, 1867, 1868. In 1875 he was elected judge of probate, and again in 1877 and 1878. He was for many years the acknowledged manager of the Democratic party in the town. He was the largest contributor to the Industrial School building, having given $10,000 for this purpose. Leavenworth hall was named by the managers in recognition of the gift. He was the first president of the Dime Savings bank.

Elisha Leavenworth, who never remarried, left his house, upon his death in 1911, to the Waterbury Girl’s Club. That year, a Masonic Temple, now part of the Mattatuck Museum, was built on the site of the house, which was moved nearby to 35 Park Place. The Girls Club is now known as Girls Inc.

American Legion Hall, Granby (1847)

This Fourth of July we’re looking at the American Legion Hall in North Granby. In 1845, in his History of Simsbury, Granby, and Canton, Noah A. Phelps wrote that “There is a society of Universalists in North Granby. The members meet every other Sunday for worship, and have taken measures to erect a house for their religions meetings.” By 1848, as explained in The Universalist Miscellany, Volume 5, No. 8, “The Universalist Church recently erected in Granby, Ct., was dedicated on the 1st of December [1847]. Sermon by Bro. H. B. Soule, of Hartford. The church is a very neat building, and will seat three hundred persons.” The Universalist congregation disbanded in 1911 and the former church served as a school until 1949. It then became an American Legion Hall.

The Alanson Abbe House (1832)

Dr. Alanson Abbe was a doctor who specialized in spinal injuries. He used his 1832 house, at 65 South Street in Litchfield, as a hospital for a decade before moving to Boston in 1839. The house, which has a portico with Doric columns wrapping around on three sides, is one of few high-style examples of the Greek Revival in Litchfield, because the town was in a period of economic decline during the period the style was in favor nationally.

The Thaddeus Burr Homestead (1790)

The Burr Homestead, on the Old Post Road in Fairfield, is a mansion built in 1790 by Thaddeus Burr (pdf) a wealthy landowner and uncle of Aaron Burr. It replaced the original Burr Mansion, built in 1732, which stood on the same site. In that earlier house, in 1775, Burr‘s friend John Hancock had married Dorothy Quincy, whose father was also an old friend of Thaddeus Burr. The old mansion was burned in the British raid on Fairfield in 1779, in spite of the pleas of Burr’s wife, Eunice, who even had the silver buckles stolen from her shoes by British soldiers. According to A general history of the Burr family in America (1878), by Charles Burr Todd:

A few weeks after the burning, Gov. Hancock paid his old friend a visit, and while they were surveying the ruins, he remarked to Mr. Burr that he must rebuild, and offered to furnish the glass needed, provided he would build a house precisely like his own in Boston—not an inconsiderable gift, as all who have seen the Governor’s unique mansion, fronting on Boston Common, must admit. Mr. Burr accepted the offer, and built a house the exact counterpart of Mr. Hancock’s. The site of the mansion burned in 1779 is now occupied by the residence of Wm. Jones, Esq.

Gen. Gershom Burr inherited the new house, built by architect-builder Daniel Dimon, from his uncle Thaddeus, who died in 1801. The next owner, Obadiah W. Jones, remodeled and enlarged the mansion in the 1840s. As described in An Historic Mansion, Being an Account of the Thaddeus Burr Homestead, Fairfield, Connecticut, 1654-1915 (1915), by Frank S. Child, the alterations included, “taking out the dormer windows and lifting the roof, taking away the porch and building the broad veranda with its lofty massive fluted columns.” The mansion had other owners over the years. Now owned by the Town of Fairfield and managed by the Fairfield Museum and History Center, the Burr Homestead has restored gardens and the house can be rented for events.

Arad Welton House (1850)

The Arad Welton House, at 238 West Main Street in Cheshire, is a Greek Revival house with large wings extending on each side. The front porch was added around 1900. Arad W. Welton was a manufacturer and first president of the Cheshire Manufacturing Company, established in 1850, which produced combs, brass buttons and other stamped goods. In 1901, the company combined with the Ball and Socket Fastener Co. of Portsmouth N.H. and became the Ball and Socket Manufacturing Co., which focused on buttons.